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Content Team

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Sales Forecasting

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3900

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16 Min

Solutions for Tracking Sales Activities in SFDC

10-29-2018

[ This article is inspired by the commentary from a thread composed by members of the Modern Sales Pros community — an exclusive, invite-only, group of sales operations, enablement, management, and leadership experts. We are sponsoring membership for any of our readers who want to join the community — apply for community membership hereand put us “MoData” down as your sponsor. ]

As a sales leader, you are always interested in tracking your sales performance and quickly gaining insight into your pipeline. Sometimes, sales leaders have requirements to track sales activities of their sales reps via Tasks in Salesforce so that, whenever needed, they can pull out the data and get insight on how close the sales reps are to closing a deal. If you find yourself among the 95% of sales managers who are doing this regularly, this post will help you find some of the viable alternatives available to get this done

Clari is the mobile-first predictive sales tool and sales managers can easily view the engagement levels between reps and prospects to know where the deals are headed. Supports automated activity capture from email infrastructure without the need for manual activity logging in SFDC.

MoData’s activity tracking is another viable option. Connects directly with most popular email infrastructures eliminating the need for manual activity logging in SFDC.

Troops.ai integrates well with Salesforce and Slack. It is bot-based and gives insight on the conversations your team is having by searching Slack. All this is possible without toggling between multiple applications. And the report is shown in the Slack itself.

People.ai connects to and collects data on sales activities from everywhere and brings it back to the Salesforce.

A recently unveiled solution from SFDC called Einstein is another option. Einstein comes with a capability called – Automated Activity Capture of Einstein, which lets users connect their Gmail or Microsoft account to Salesforce. Consequently, the email and events automatically get related to the corresponding Salesforce records.

Salesforce.com Einstein More Than Activity Capture

Besides, activity capture, Einstein also automates the sales prediction model for Salesforce customers with just a few clicks. With AI enabled Einstein, you won’t have to approach expensive consultants and data scientists to create new machine learning models or hone the models for weeks. It sounds great right? Let’s check out a few pros & cons.

First off, Einstein does get excellent reviews for bringing AI to Salesforce and quality of life among sales reps. They can anticipate the customer’s expectations with less guesswork, which enables them to take the next best action more quickly and confidently.

However, the super-intelligent Salesforce Einstein comes with a bit of baggage:

It can be an expensive solution for small and medium businesses- $75 per user per month and custom Einstein analytics apps are double that, starting at around $150 per user every month.

Although it claims to support handling massive data sets with millions of records, so far, customers often have seen it breaking down after only a few thousand.

Salesforce’s expensive customization and cumbersome reporting could be an overwhelming affair for a small business with limited resources.

Apart from this, SFDC users still have to manually log calls, create tasks and events in SFDC, which is a consuming process prone to error and low integrity.

Conclusion

There are plenty of “activity capture” options out there in the market for that are suitable for every stage of growth and type of sales team. Surveying the market and exploring different tools will ensure that you are picking what’s best for your unique situation and not using what is the most common just because you know the name. Do you already have experience with any of these? Did we miss something on our list? Feel free to contact us and tell us your thoughts! If you found this article interesting be sure to check out the rest of our scoops on the sales world at our blog here

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